April 23, 1933: 'Miss Lonelyhearts' by Nathanael West This is humor, if you like, or satire, if you see it that way. The orthodox communist critic would call its spirit ''defeatism.'' Edmund Wilson speaks of the author as an original comic poet, a humorist with a philosophico-poetic point of view. Erskine Caldwell thinks the book will be hailed as clever and amusing by the general public, but to him it is a tragic story.

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March 19, 2010, Friday

April 23, 1933: 'Miss Lonelyhearts' by Nathanael West This is humor, if you like, or satire, if you see it that way. The orthodox communist critic would call its spirit ''defeatism.'' Edmund Wilson speaks of the author as an original comic poet,...

October 6, 1996, Sunday

Robert Stone's latest novel, ''Children of Light,'' takes place largely on a movie set in Mexico. The narrator, a writer whose screenplay is undergoing filming, goes there in search of the starring actress, with whom he has had a love affair, and to...

July 12, 1970, Sunday

At first, it comes as a shock to discover that Jay Martin's new book is the first biography of Nathanael West ever written. Nearly 30 years have passed since the Sunday afternoon in December of 1940, when West died with his wife (the former Eileen...

June 15, 1970, Monday

PERHAPS I am getting old and delicate, but in any case I must confess (to borrow the patented expression of a friend of mine) that it is a long time since I read two less ingratiating books than the new ones by Jerome Weidman and Nathanael West.

THIS is a plain, unadorned tale in the good old Horatio Alger Jr. tradition of an American boy who made good -- at least post-humously. For Lemuel Pitkin, although he never gets his cool million and is finally murdered, becomes the hero of the...

July 1, 1934, Sunday

HAVING been lectured by Edwin Seaver for discovering "entertainment" in T.S. Stribling's "Unfinished Cathedral," with its raffish and ironic panorama of social decay in the South, I should, no doubt, approach Nathanael West's "A Cool Million, or the...